The Killer Elite (1975)

December 18, 1975

'Killer Elite,' or Copping Out of the Universal Sell-Out

By RICHARD EDER

Published: December 18, 1975

Sam Peckinpah knows how to make movies but perhaps he has forgotten why. At least that is the feeling given by this bag of mixed, often damp fireworks about the alienation of people who do dirty tricks for the Central Intelligence Agency and discover that the tricks as well as the dirt are on them.

"The Killer Elite," which opened yesterday at the Criterion and other theaters, resembles "Three Days of the Condor" so closely that it is as if Mr. Peckinpah had deliberately set himself to do flashier variations on the same theme.

The theme is the world as universal sell-out. The metaphor is a covert intelligence organization that does malignant things ostensibly in a good cause. The protagonist is an individual who unwittingly falls afoul of one of the organization's plans, becomes its target and ultimately, after all kinds of mayhem, discovers its ends are as amoral as its methods, and walks out.

James Caan plays the role Robert Redford had in "Three Days." Since he is a better actor than Mr. Redford—sharper, more urgent—he is more convincing. Since Mr. Peckinpah is more talented than Sidney Pollack, who did "Three Days," his film has moments, at least, of greater brilliance.

Both pictures operate on the premise that the audience has brought along its eyes but left its head at home. Both are relentlessly far-fetched, presenting all the conceivable outrageousness of the clandestine world at the maximum, and without restaint. A work of art can't be credible when it makes everything happen that can happen.

Mr. Peckinpah is mannered and inventive, and these qualities both give the film its strengths and undermine it horrendously. Cleverness, for one thing, gets in the way of comprehensibility. The plot revolves around the efforts of a fanatical group of Japanese terrorists to kill an anti-Communist Chinese leader.

The attempt at the airport, with a spectacular slow-motion depiction of assassination by kungfu, is intercut with an indoor scene where the motives for all this are explained. The result is that the subsequent action is very hard to follow and it takes a long time to figure out which group of Orientals stands for what.

There is a confrontation scene between the leader of the clandestine group and his main assistant, who is working for the other side. The two men glower but don't confront: they talk about the stock market, instead. Perhaps this is stylish, but it is hopelessly obscure, and the film, which lasts 123 minutes, has already been going on for about 100.

On the other hand, Mr. Peckinpah uses his inventiveness to good purpose in the early part of the film. The protagonist has been grievously wounded by a fellow member of his organization. He sets himself to recover so he can avenge himself; his superiors vaguely discourage him.

In his painful hospital recovery—done with some of the director's bent for sadistic directness—each exercise, each effort to walk becomes another stage in the hero's progressive alienation from his organization.

There is a fine scene at the end where the anticommunist leader is being taken by sailboat to presumed safety on a line of mothballed Navy ships. The dead warships, in a massive gray line, wait: a stunning image of entrapment.

The climactic battle scene, aboard the warships, is ridiculously operatic, however. If a brief use of slow motion in the airport scene was effective, here it goes on endlessly. The notion of the various clandestine operatives standing around while the Chinese leader and his enemies fight things out with sabers is absurb; what is worse, the sight of it is absurd.

If there ever was a screenplay—the credits claim that there was—either it was feeble to begin with, or Mr. Peckinpah has gone galloping all over the lot with it. This director thinks he can do anything he wants, and he is nearly right: But he is a long way from his audience.